302 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
presumption. 1 Positive sociology is an attempt to set in order the facts so that an induction may some day be sanctioned.
The thesis is plausible that the essential likeness of all men is a fact ; that this fact has always been one of the conditions of human association, and has fixed an outer boundary beyond which men would not pass in their treatment of each other ; that progressive tacit recognition of aspects or connotations of this fact has tended to con- tract the boundaries of authorized inhumanity, or to fit conceptions of justice to partial recognition of the fact of likeness; that recognition of likeness has been conscious in a few exceptional men ; that recog- nition of likeness tends to become general, to pass from a negative to a positive influence, to become a relatively more potent factor among the social forces; that this recognition of likeness is the social deside- ratum, as the major premise of social judgments, and the basis of social action. Something very like this is the pivotal idea in Janet's Theory of Morals. All that is 'true in this connection seems to be contained in the open secret which Jesus left as his legacy to the world. 2 Our failure to see with his insight and the impossibility of getting many people even today to accept his discovery as point of departure for their social policy, mark the precise antithesis of Giddings' version of history. He no more expresses the social truth than he would express the physical truth if he said " Gravitation is the cause of all physical phenomena."
These items by no means exhaust the list of structural weaknesses in the book. In spite of their radical character, however, which destroys all continuity in Giddings' system, we may discount their effects and still recognize an important and valuable remainder. It is Giddings' foible to magnify his disagreements with other sociologists, and then by ora- tio variata, or perhaps without it, to reduce the difference in practice to a minimum. 3 I am inclined therefore to consider the dogmatic
1 Preface, pp. 19, 22, 38, 183, etc.
-Vide Professor Mathews' article above p. 283 sq.
3 E. g., p. 7 and p. 9, note. In the former case he gratuitously attributes a foolish idea to others and then credits himself with superior sagacity for meaning precisely what the criticised always asserted. In the second case he reflects very contemp- tuously upon a programme proposed by others, which is precisely what he has attempted to carry out in the body of his own book. The only difference between the programme which he adopts and that at which he sneers is that the latter has no recognized place for dogmatism. Vide also p. 66, where the phrase method of psychological synthesis permits him to come into line with the conception which he in terms rejects viz., that
